...tighten things up a bit more. I found the 11.04 an 11.10 releases to be terribly unstable if you are upgrading in place. Let us hope that any tablet, TV or phone OS release of theirs has a much tighter development model. People who buy TVs, phones and tablets want to have those devices "just work". Computer users are used to having to work around problems. Can you imagine the horror of having to wait for a TV to boot, or to have functionality of the TV change to the point where you have to relearn everything after an upgrade? And I'm an Android user... I love to tweak things which is why little else appeals.

...Apple and Kodak were the first two companies out of the gate with the very first consumer level digital cameras.

...and we've seen both. First is that most developers who write great efficient code usually suck at UI design. They don't know how to make something truly aesthetically pleasing from an artistic perspective. Some can, but it's a rare bird. For the rest, an eBook is just data. If the story is there in monotype font with no antialiasing and no aesthetic flow of the text itself, they've done their job. On the other hand, how many of you remember the "multimedia CDs" of the 90s where a band would release a new album that would typically contain some sort of Shockwave application for Windows or Mac? Some of them were pretty close rivals to the album sleeve art of previous decades. Only they added interactivity beyond just looking at or displaying the thing.

How many of you remember that most of those things were a steaming pile when it came to code? I dissected a few (as well as DVD menus and even DVDs) and found that while the art might look beautiful, there is usually no regard for wasting resources. This is something that coders are driven insane by. You might see the same super large video file duplicated three times in different directories instead of just referencing a single one. The same with graphical content.

eBook designers should strike a balance between providing an aesthetic experience that is at least equivalent to the finest printed books, and as efficient as the most spare Perl script. Good luck finding people who can master both. They are out there, but they're rare.

(This comment is an altered repost of something I accidentally posted anonymously yesterday.)

You know what I mean. Teddy Roosevelt.

But that's where the fun came from. You learned the config file enough to get your system to do things it wasn't intended to do, or do them better than anyone who didn't mess with the config. These days, the only thing that makes one person's device more "fun" than someone else's is largely up to the developers of the web service or app and it's not as easy to get your system to outdo someone else's other than by paying more money for something "better". That's no fun.

Not really. But think of the fun you'll have trying to figure that out! :)

...for me has always been that any OS or device I've used has been riddled with bone headed design decision. Things that break easily with normal use. UI elements that are the wrong size or in the wrong place. Poor choice of fonts. In all honesty, you'd have to be pretty simple minded to love every product that comes out of a single company or every bit of software that comes from the same developer. I mean look at the Ford vs. Chevy guys. That's the ultimate outcome of customer loyalty: a lack of thinking. Given that most of us here are rugged individualists, it's a natural assumption that we're going to want to do things our own way. Sometimes that will be just giving in an saying, "Oh the heck with it, Apple makes a pretty decent device and I don't have the time to fiddle". Other times it will be, "Good lord Microsoft can't code a decent UI to find their way out of a virtual box of nothing. Screw this I'm going back to (insert better OS choice for your needs here)". Show me a person who says, "Everything that (insert company or developer) created has always been perfect and I've had no need to change a thing" and I'll show you a liar. Config files, preferences, options, themes, control panels all exist for a reason: nothing is perfect.

Buy! Never! Something that clunky should be FREE!!! ;P

I remember the early days of Slashdot where this would have everyone talking. It's pretty damn cool. At this point it's prefect for reproducing real old school gaming. DOSBox is great for that too. But look... you're running a real DOS here! No VM needed! Pull out your 486! Get out your 1994 era Pentium 90! Relive the days when computing was actually fun! I installed FreeDOS with GEM (which was the better GUI compared to Windows back in the day until Apple ruined it by suing Digital Research) on a laptop from 1998. That thing is a BEAST now. Seriously, doesn't anyone get excited about this stuff anymore?

Sorry, but you're wrong: http://www.webmd.com/diet/calc-bmi-plus

My BMI hovers between 20 and 21. That is actually incredibly healthy.

No. No it's not.

This is 1.5 hours long, but this man speaks the truth: sugar (fast carbs) is poison.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

The rest of this is addressed to anyone interested enough to read it:

I can also attest to the massive changes in my health after eliminating simple carbs and going for complex carbs (meaning more fiber as well) in my diet in 2003. Weight loss wasn't even a goal as I didn't even think I was near the upper end of "healthy" for my size at the time (6' and 185 lbs. at that time. I have been consistently 155 since developing a new relationship with food). The changes I made were to combat reflux. That worked. No purple pill or surgery for me and the reflux is gone.

A lot of the illnesses in western culture are clearly linked to the western diet (read Michael Pollan's book An Eater's Manifesto). The western diet is far too focused on simple/fast carbs. I believe this is largely a self feeding addiction (I believed that long before seeing the video linked above but it's nice to have a doctor confirm this). The hardest part of changing how you eat is making it to the point where your sense of taste very literally changes.

Believe it or not, if you eat the standard American diet, it's likely that your taste buds lack much sensitivity. I would not have believed it if I didn't experience it myself. Eating all of those heavily processed foods with artificial flavors that beat the hell out of your taste buds is akin to staring at a bright light for hours and then going into a darkened gallery with the most beautiful art... that you cannot see until your eyes readjust. Same thing with food. Processed and artificially flavored food is like the bright light. You aren't really tasting real food when you encounter it. That's why many of the healthier choices "lack flavor" or even "taste bad". Try going for a month without eating anything but fruits, vegetables, and high quality cuts of meat and poultry, but being heavy on the vegetables. Also avoid all sugared drinks. Just drink water or tea. I guarantee that you'll open up a whole new world of flavors and what you used to think tasted great, will be too intense.

OK, I know the project is trying to appease the knuckle draggers who can't use their brains to learn how to use a GUI. But, I'm hoping they retain fullscreen with the ability to basically hide all tools. When you're someone who actually knows what they're doing with image manipulation you want the maximum amount of space to work in. The toolbars and menus should be nearly non-existent until you need them. GIMP has done this for a LONG time. The idea of having a massive, ugly mess of toolbars "docked" is simply to cater to moronic users who have poor memory skills. So be it. The fact is that about 80% of the computer user base is moronic, so there IS mind share there which will only improve GIMP's adoption. But don't take away vital functionality for users who actually *think*.

TT

So I haven't been around here for a while. Not because I don't like Slashdot, but because it's largely become a ghost town in terms of new stories thanks to the cesspool known as Digg. Having been involved in on-line communities since the late 80s (Cleveland Freenet is dead. LONG LIVE the Cleveland Freenet!) I can say that this was predictable. What I didn't predict is that mindless and uncreative trolls such as yourself would still be involved in the Gnome vs. KDE or KDE vs. Gnome wars. It's like those stories you hear about people finding Japanese soldiers a decade or two later on some uncharted island who are still fighting WW II. Give it a rest. Go home.

Both environments have their uses from the end-user perspective. Gnome definitely won on claiming the minds of developers. Which of the two has more USEFUL software these days? I'll give you a hint, it doesn't try to ape Windows. That said, which development platform caters to more fringe users (not pejorative in the least because I'm one of them) with much more specific uses than grandma? I'll give you another hint, its developers can't seem to come up with creative names so they preface everything with a K or a Q.

In a way I feel pity for you. You would have engaged a lot of people back in the day. But today, you're kind of like the crazy old uncle who gets drunk at family parties and starts feeling up his nieces: sad and very very wrong. Pack it in soldier. The world has moved on.

TT

That's kind of the sad thing. I'm not 100% sure who is who on Multiply other than the ones who kept the same name, or have big enough presence to shine through any UID. ;) It's becoming harder and harder to find people to talk scripting with who also don't mind just talking about other stuff. Oh well, eventually there will be another "rapture" and communities will shift again. I think this is my fifth or sixth time since 1989.